The proposed research will examine two general cognitive approaches to an understanding of stereotyping. The first set of studies will investigate the hypothesis that people attend differentially to novel persons, i.e., people with attributes which are distinctive in a given context, and that this differential attention results in differential retention of information, dispositional attributions about the causes of novel person's behavior, and the perception of the novel person as a strong causal force in given interaction. The research plan will be geared toward elucidating the perceptions that others have of physically distinctive persons in their environment, including "token" or solo blacks, women, and handicapped workers. The second set of studies will examine how perceptions of people and the relations among them change as a function of categorizing them into groups on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity. Specifically, it is predicted that the act of grouping people or objects into a category leads to distorted perceptions of similarity among the people or objects on dimensions both relevant and irrelevant to the basis for categorization. It is hypothesized that this cognitive mechanism underlies stereotyping of minority group members.